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Thursday, August 14, 2014

Starting a Backup Exec job from Powershell (After Veeam jobs finish)

When my weekly Veeam jobs finish, I have a post-job script that triggers a Backup Exec job that writes the Veeam backup files to tape. Yes, Veeam has built-in tape writing abilities now, but I still have physical servers to care and feed, and therefore Backup Exec still handles my tapes. Having just upgraded from Backup Exec 2010 to Backup Exec 2014, I learned that bemcli.exe had been removed. This was the old, atiquated way of running commands from the CLI to control Backup Exec. Smartly, they have replaced that with a Powershell module.

At a high level, here are the commands that your script needs to start a Backup Exec job:#This command loads the moduleImport-Module "C:\program files\symantec\backup exec\modules\bemcli\bemcli"#This command starts the job, with inline confirmationStart-bejob -inputobject "YourBackupExecJobName" -confirm:$false

For your entertainment, I'll now paste in my entire post job script, where I have built in a couple of handy features. Namely, an email telling me that whether the tape job has started or not, and an if statement that only starts the tape job if there are no failed backup jobs. If there's a failure, this gives me an opportunity to fix it before starting the tape-writing job.

Further commentary within this Veeam post-job script:#-------------------------BEGIN SCRIPT------------------------#Add the Veeam snap-in and the Backup Exec moduleAdd-PSSnapin VeeamPSSnapinImport-Module "C:\program files\symantec\backup exec\modules\bemcli\bemcli"#Set the initial counter, used to count Veeam job failures, used later in the IF statement$Result = 0#Email variables$To = "me@contoso.com"$From = "helpdesk@contoso.com"$SMTPServer = "mailserver.contoso.com"#Get all of the weekly Veeam jobs. My weekly jobs all have a "Weekly" prefix$Statuses = (get-vbrjob | where {$_.Name -like "Weekly*"})#Go through each Veeam job and increment $Result if a job has an unsuccessful status#I'm not counting warnings, which can be triggered when a VM has been resized and Change Block Tracking has been resetForeach ($Job in $Statuses){If ($Job.GetLastResult() -notlike "Success" -and $Job.GetLastResult() -notlike "Warning"){$Result++} #End If} #End Foreach#If the $Result equals 0, all the jobs were successful. Start the tape copy and email meIf ($Result -eq 0){ #The following line uses the old (Backup Exec 2010) method for starting the tape job#start-process "C:\Program Files\Symantec\Backup Exec\bemcmd.exe" -ArgumentList '-o1 -j"MyTapeJob"' #This next line is the new way of calling the tape job in Backup Execstart-bejob -inputobject "MyTapeJob" -confirm:$false $To = "me@contoso.com"$Subject = "Veeam to Tape Job Started"Send-Mailmessage -to $To -Subject $subject -From $From -body $body -smtpserver $SMTPServer} #End If#If the result does not equal 0, email meIf ($Result -gt 0){$Body = "The Veeam to Tape job has NOT started due to errors"$Subject = "VEEAM BACKUP ERRORS: Veeam to Tape Job NOT Started"Send-Mailmessage -to $To -Subject $subject -From $From -body $body -smtpserver $SMTPServer} #End If#-------------------------END SCRIPT------------------------